Sunday, February 26, 2017

In 2008 the Coen Brother's NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN won the Best Film Oscar this year. Three minutes of the creepy lead actor's haircut was enough for me. I chucked the DVD into the swamp behind my house and haven't heard from it since, but at the Pattaya court I ran into an aging farang living the title of that movie.

The court clerk patiently explained his trial date in Thai. The Brit didn't understand a word and I translated for him, only to be engaged as a confessor.

John was English. He had been involved with a hot-tempered Thai woman for the past 16 years. 9 months ago he decided to end the relationship, but Thai girls were harder to get out of your life than gum in your hair.

Two weeks ago he was summoned up-country by a phone call. His ex- was in the hospital. As soon as he appeared, two Pattaya cops arrested him for assault. 100,000 baht bail and they seized possession of his passport. His wife had accused him of beating her. He protested that he wasn't that type of man and all the police had to do was check the hospitals for evidence of a beating.

"Where's your lawyer?"

"What do I need a lawyer for?"

"This is a criminal charge." I sometimes wondered if farangs deposit their common sense at the airport. "You don't understand Thai and you want to go to court without a lawyer."

"My last lawyer charged me 4000 baht to get out of jail."

"Cheap."

"Yeah, but she didn't do anything."

This was going nowhere and I explained that he should be represented. I gave him the telephone number of my lawyer. He didn't even bother to write it down and I wished him luck.

John was 54. He had worked all his life. His Thai wife has everything now and he was on the verge of going to jail. In this case Thailand was definitely not a country for old men, although John didn't consider himself old.

In 2010 the Somali government was hard-pressed by warlords. Troops chewed qat. Their afternoons were spent in a euphoric stupor. Few wanted to man roadblocks, so children were drafted into the army. AK-47s replaced their battered toys. They were happy with A few dollars a week for food. Lucky in a country where there was no work.

Everyone loved the lucky. The lottery players on our soi in Jomtien had my son Fenway pick their tickets. They won three times. Not big money. Not little each. Fenway was considered lucky and lucky in Thailand was good. Good other countries too.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca.

I feel lucky for my life. I have a good family, a beautiful wife, Mam, a job (and that's not a small thing these days) and my health, but some people wanted more and hard work was not the answer for their desire. They knew hard work didn't pay away problems. They needed a break and that year Thai police arrested a former nurse selling post-abortion foetuses as "child ghosts" or 'luk krok'. The officers found 14 pickled foetuses in her inventory. She told investigators that the 'child ghosts' were good at picking lotteries.

Most Thais would preferred to have a luk krok amulet than the real thing.

Of course the power of the luk krok was stronger in Ban-nok.

Most farangs don't buy into these beliefs. They were too smart to believe. But not all farangs were so smart as to be that stupid.

Through his campaign Donald Trump complained about the lack of impartiality from the Mainstream Media. In truth CNN and MSNBC loved the billionaire's antic for providing their viewers with cheap entertainment and their interviewers pitched softballs to the GOP candidate, never calling him out on his lies.

Not that Trump's supporters waver in their faith in the crusade to make America great again.

They are cursed by the miracle of deception.

Truth is not truth. Lies are truth. Trump excelled parroting the blurbs of their paranoid fears, but recent allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election had Trump crowing about the constant barrage of falsehoods from reporters at the White House briefings, so Trump banned his detractors from a press gaggle with Scott Spicer in the White House.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

The AK-47 or Kalash was the assault rifle of choice for insurgents, rebels, revolutionaries, and armed forces since its introduction by the Soviet Army in 1946. The weapon maximized close combat firepower with easy operational needs. Its silhouette graced the flag of the Red Army Faction and was considered the first choice of terrorists, because of its accessibility.

"Remember one man's terrorists is another man's freedom fighter, so we all sort of think, oh boy, we've got a little bit of Che Guevara in us. And this accounts for the popularity of the (AK 47) weapon. Plus I think that in the United States it's considered counterculture, which is always something that citizens in this country kind of like ... It's kind of sticking a finger in the eye of the man, if you will." Larry Kahaner, author of AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War

Not any more.

In 2011 the Russian army announced the cessation of orders for the AK47, while awaiting a better weapon.

An end of an era.

Only for the Russkis, because there are enough AK-47s around to last till 2030, which is a good thing, because we'll need them for the apocalypse.

Dmitri Turin was born in Russia. His mother was a mathematician. His father was reputed to have been KGB. Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova left him to marry the legendary Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Politburo exiled the writer and his family in 1974. They moved to America.

Edward Snowden fled the USA with the NSA on his tail. The system analyst had informed the Guardian newspaper that the clandestine agency was illegally spying on millions upon million of American citizens. This breach of constitutional rights by the government was greeted with yawns and 'so whats' by the dazed public, however the Obama administration sought to extradite the former CIA employee from China, forcing Mr. Snowdon to leave Hong Kong for Moscow from where he hope to catch a flight to Ecuador.

The White House threatened the South American democracy with onerous sanctions, if the fugitive was permitted to fly to Quito.

Ecuador's national currency was the US dollar. Trade between the two nations amounted to billions.

Snowden's passport was revoked by the State Department and the man without a country has been stuck in Moscow without any indication from the Russian authorities as to a departure date or destination.

His father has asked his son to return.

Don't do it, dude.

As Don Corleone told his son in THE GODFATHER, "When they come for you, it will be someone close."

Or something like that.

Of course there is nothing wrong with living in an airport.

Tom Hanks' character in THE TERMINAL seemed to have thrived at JFK, but I got stuck at the old Moscow in 1994 during an Aeroflot from Kuala Lumpur to Karachi to Dubai to Moscow. My final stop was Paris.

The 350-seater Ilyushin Il-86 were far from comfortable. The seats were back-breakers, the air-conditioning produced a thick fog, the food service was cut to starvation rations, and the flight crew disappeared after each take-off.

On the Dubai stop a young Norwegian couple and I bought wine and food for the next leg.

The stewardesses ignored us and every other passenger from Dubai to Moscow. We were on our own.

Ten hours later we landed in Moscow. My connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle had been cancelled and the next plane wasn't taking off until the next morning.

The two Norwegians were in a similar predicament.

It was only 10PM, but no restaurants were open and there was no place to sleep, however the Norwegians and I each had two bottles of wine. We drank them within two hours, then wandered the terminal in search for more alcohol.

Stateless transients were huddled in makeshift cardboard villages and one Afghani sold us a bottle of homemade vodka. The liter took a long time to drink. Several Russians joined us. They had their own brew. It burnt a hole in my stomach. More nationalities joined our party. Burmese, Tibetans, Acehese, Baluchis, Kurds, Druse, Berbers, Rwandans, Angolans, and Bushmen gathered into a stateless congress. They all wanted to leave. They had no place to go and after ten hours I started to think that I would remain there forever, however at Aeroflot announced the imminent departure of the Moscow-Paris flight.

The League of no Nations bid farewell in Babel tongues.

The Norwegians carried me to the plane.

I was in no condition to be near heavy equipment and bounced down the aisle. Every passenger prayed that I wouldn’t sit next to them. I found an empty row and passed out within seconds of clicking shut my seatbelt.

Several hours later at Charles De Gaulle I woke up still drunk, but happy to have escape from Moscow Airport.

The USA and the USSR waged a Cold War across the world. America and her proxy nations fought wars in Korea and Viet-Nam. Countless conflicts burned on every continent and in the air as well as on the sea. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stated at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956, "My vas pokhoronim!" or 'we shall bury you'.

This boast haunted the West and state security apparatus on this side of the Iron Curtain repressed any dissent with savagery.

Death to the SLA.

Death to the Baader-Meinhof Gang

Death to Che.

The USSR gambled on conquering Afghanistan.

1979-1988.

This failure weakened the Big Bear and Mikhail Gorbachev refused to support his East European allies.

Poland defected from the Soviet Bloc and the USSR fell apart with the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Western leaders toasted their victory, however Kruschchev's antecedents remember the power of mighty Rodina and Premier Putin rules the Kremlin with the seemingly full support of the Russian people. The Beasr has re-awakened and shovels are sought to fulfill Nikita's prophecy with help from the traitor Donald Trump.

Pattaya Ghost

About Me

OPEN CITY declared Peter Nolan Smith an underground punk legend of the 1970s East Village. In the last century the New England native worked as a nightclub doorman at New York’s Hurrah and Milk Bar, Paris’ Les Bains-Douches and Balajo, London’s Cafe de Paris, and Hamburg’s Bsir.

Throughout the 1990s Peter Nolan Smith was employed as a diamond salesman on West 47th Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Diamond District.

The 2000s were spent in Thailand running an internet company and raising his family.

More recently he was appointed the unofficial writer-in-residence to an embassy in Mittel Europa.

The constant traveler has lived for long periods of time in Tibet and the Far East; he is currently based in Fort Greene, New York and Thailand researching the secrets of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as putting the final touches on BACK AND FORTH his historical semi-fictional book about hitchhiking across the USA in 1974.

His website www.mangozeen.com covers news and semi fiction from around the globe with over 5000 entries over the past five years written by Peter Nolan Smith.